


Harvey Doesn't Like It

by LadySokolov



Series: Batman Telltale tumblr prompt fills [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman: The Telltale Series (Video Game)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Disturbing Themes, Gen, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-10 15:13:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8922022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadySokolov/pseuds/LadySokolov
Summary: For a prompt on tumblr:
Bruce visiting Harvey in Arkham a week after the end of the game. He's wearing a muzzle because he keeps biting at his burns.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Still taking prompts on my tumblr, so feel free to go there and request stuff if you want. As you can probably tell from the summary, this is going to get pretty messed up.

HARVEY DOESN'T LIKE IT

The last time Bruce had walked the halls of Arkham Asylum he had been fighting for his own life and afraid for Alfred’s. The time before that he had been scared, confused and half out of his mind thanks to the effects of Lady Arkham’s drugs. And honestly, this time he felt just as uncomfortable and unwelcome in Arkham’s halls as he had during his previous visits. 

The dust had settled, Lady Arkham, Penguin and Mayor Dent had all been taken care of in one way or another, he was about as safe and secure as he had ever been since he had become Batman, and yet he couldn’t help but feel like the Asylum was closing in around him, ready to swallow him and all of the inmates whole should they turn their backs on the old buildings for longer than a second. 

He found himself looking at the old halls and run-down facilities in a new light now, taking note of everything that would need to be upgraded to bring the facility up to standards that he would be more comfortable with. They would need more staff with better training, better equipment, more secure and comfortable cells, more space... The list of renovations seemed endless, and yet Bruce was determined to make sure that the facility received every dollar that they needed to make that list a reality.

That wasn’t the current reason for his visit however. His reason was a few inches taller than him, someone who Bruce had considered a friend until a few weeks earlier, and currently registered as an inmate in Arkham Asylum.

“I should warn you,” Doctor Joan Leland said as she lead Bruce down the hallway, “we haven’t had much progress with him so far. He’s been hostile, even violent with some of the staff here. Don’t be surprised if he lashes out at you as well.”

“Don’t worry,” Bruce said, forcing himself to give the psychiatrist as sincere a smile as possible. “I’m not expecting any miracles. But well... Harvey was my friend. I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t swing by the Asylum every so often to see how he was doing.”

“Maybe a friendly face will help,” Leland suggested, but the frown on her face told Bruce that she thought it pretty damn unlikely.

Bruce wasn’t holding too much hope either. He and Harvey had not exactly parted on the best of terms.

Leland came to a stop in front of a cell door near the end of the hallway.

“This is it,” she told Bruce, before sliding the viewing window open.

He took a deep breath and stepped forward, but was stopped by Leland placing a hand on his shoulder.

“Be careful what you say to him,” the doctor said.

Bruce nodded slowly and then leaned down so that his eyes were in line with the viewing window.

Bruce had been expecting Harvey’s cell to look exactly like his own had when he had been committed to Arkham, but when he peeked inside the cell it became clear that the asylum staff viewed Harvey as being a higher risk patient than Bruce had been. The walls were padded, rather than the hard tile that had been in Bruce’s room, and while Bruce had at least somewhat expected the straight jacket that was confining the larger man, he had not expected the mask that covered the lower half of Harvey’s face.

At first he thought the mask might have been there to cover Harvey’s scarring, but it covered the wrong portion of the other man’s face for that to be the reason for it.

“Why is he wearing a mask?” Bruce asked Leland. At that moment Harvey turned towards the door and Bruce got a better look at the other man’s face, and the contraption which blocked the lower half of it.

It wasn’t really a mask, at least, not like the masks that both he and Harvey had chosen to wear outside of the asylum to cover their identity or their scars. No, the more Bruce looked at it the more he was forced to admit that Harvey wasn’t wearing a mask.

He was wearing a muzzle.

“It’s to protect him and help with the healing,” Leland explained. She sounded tired. Bruce could sympathize.

“To protect him?” Bruce asked.

“He was biting at his burns,” Leland explained.

Bruce supposed that what Leland said made sense. The worst of Harvey’s scarring had been to his face after all. It must have been hard to stop the other man’s mouth and teeth from grating against the recovering tissue and causing problems with healing.

“Bruce Wayne,” a deep, half-growled voice emerged from within Harvey’s cell.

The large man stumbled towards the door and immediately crouched down so that he was looking Bruce right in the eye.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Harvey asked him. The muzzle made the already deep, gravelly voice that Dent adopted when in a darker mood even deeper. The sound, combined with the smell of anesthetic and burned flesh that came from Harvey’s room made Bruce recoil sharply back from the door.

“I came to see you,” Bruce explained. “I wanted to make sure that they were taking care of you.”

For a moment Harvey was silent, and then, with a severe frown, and in a voice as coarse as sandpaper, he spoke.

“Well, now you’ve seen me. What do you think? Am I being taken care of?”

Somehow Harvey managed to make the words sound like a threat.

Bruce realized then that Leland had moved back from the door a short distance, but was still keeping a close eye on Bruce and Harvey’s interactions.

“Is there anything that I can do for you?” Bruce asked. “Anything that you need?”

Harvey let out a long, low sigh, and Bruce saw his shoulders slump.

“I wish you hadn’t come here,” Harvey said, and this time Bruce was sure it was Harvey and not that other thing that had come to live inside of him. “I don’t want you to see me like this.” 

He sounded defeated, and almost completely broken, but it still sounded more like Harvey than the other guy, and at that moment Bruce considered even that to be an improvement.

“That mask doesn’t look too comfortable,” Bruce said. “But you’re healing under there, right? You’re getting better?”

“It needs to stay on,” Leland said, interrupting their conversation for the first time. She sounded quite adamant, and Bruce hadn’t even suggested removing it yet.

“Harvey doesn’t like it,” the man in the cell said, and Bruce frowned at the return of Harvey’s darker alter ego.

“Doesn’t like what?” Bruce asked. “The mask?”

“Well, that too.”

The muzzle covered the other man’s mouth completely, so Bruce couldn’t be entirely sure, but by the way the other man’s facial muscles stretched and his eyes gained a slight twinkle, Bruce thought that he might have been smiling beneath the mask.

“He thinks we’re supposed to have smooth, pale skin all over,” Dent continued. “He doesn’t like the burnt bits; the red and black parts where you can see through to the corruption beneath, so he started trying to remove them; sometimes with his teeth.”

The other man’s words were so disturbing that it took Bruce a moment to actually take them in and make sense of his meaning. When Leland had said that Dent had been biting himself, Bruce had thought that she had meant...

The mental image of Harvey, chewing at his broken skin like a flea-ridden dog, perfect, pearly-white teeth tearing at his own flesh, made Bruce turn pale.

Dent turned, bringing more of his face into Bruce’s view; the burnt, broken part of his face; and for the first time Bruce noticed the small trail of corrupted, unhealthy-looking blood that started beneath the muzzle and trailed down the side of the other man’s neck.

Dent chuckled; his voice low and threatening, although Bruce found it hard to imagine what he could have possibly found funny about the situation.

“Harvey’s an idiot,” the man in front of Bruce finally said, the humor not quite gone from his voice, and this time when he spoke there was a new quality to his voice, a sort of moist, gurgling sound that had Bruce’s eyes returning to the trail of red-brown ooze that had traveled down Dent’s neck and had started to stain his jumpsuit.

“This is what we were always meant to be,” Dent continued. “Broken and burned... Two halves making one sick, twisted whole...”

“That’s not true,” Bruce tried. “You’re still in there somewhere Harvey. I know you are. And I’m not going to rest until you’re back to normal.”

That earned him a scowl from Dent and a raised eyebrow from Leland.

“If you really believe that then perhaps you belong in the cell next to me,” Harvey growled, before turning his back on Bruce.

Doctor Leland was immediately back at Bruce’s side, touching him gently on the arm.

“Perhaps it’s time to go,” she told him, and Bruce thought that the doctor was probably right.

He had come to Arkham Asylum hoping that he might catch a glimpse of his friend somewhere inside the broken shell that Harvey Dent had become. He had been hoping that maybe, just maybe he would be able to help Harvey somehow, and that someday Harvey Dent would be a relatively sane, happy man once more; perhaps even one that was happy to see his old friend.

But now, as he backed away from the cell and tried to pay no attention to the shouts that were coming from within it, or to the smell of blood and burnt flesh that lingered around Harvey’s cell, he began to think that it was going to take a hell of a lot more than he had thought to pull his friend Harvey out of the darkness he had fallen into.


End file.
